sweet dreams not made of these

Lately I’ve been suffering from particularly bad dreams. Now, I have bad or unpleasant dreams from time to time like anyone, but it seems I have them every night, and they almost always wake me up out of a sound sleep.

Most of them are auto-accident related. Someone warned me about a month ago that, even though I wasn’t having them at the time, I should prepare myself for dreams about the accident later on. Apparently, she was in a car accident some years ago, and it wasn’t until a month after the fact that she started having bad dreams. I dismissed it at the time (I had one bad dream the night right after the accident, and then never again), but then, last week, they started.

First one was about me driving off a bridge into a body of water. Others are not specific enough for me to remember, other than I’m driving a car and something bad happens, whether it be a full blown accident or just me not being able to control the wheel and being terrified.

Now, in ADDITION to those dreams, I’m having other, equally bad, non car-related dreams. About death, violence and misfortune befalling myself and my loved ones (even including my dog). Of people being unnecessarily cruel to me. Of losing things that are important to me.

Most of them are not that difficult to decipher. I’m pretty clear on the things in life that are plaguing me at this moment in time. But still…having a dream where someone you know treats you in a particularly horrendous manner, and then talking to that person in reality the next day is hard to completely ignore. These dreams are constant, and putting a definite pall over my general mindset. Not to mention the difficulty of being able to fall back asleep after being woken up in such an unpleasant fashion (as I write this, it is 4:00 am, and I have been up since 2:28 am. Thank god I don’t have a job to be at in a couple hours.)

Perhaps it’s all the TV/movies/books that have a apocalyptic theme running through them (Battlestar Galactica, Metropolis, The Road) that is affecting my subconscious so. I should probably watch some Disney movies, and read some chick lit. But none of my dreams have involved the world ending. I DID dream about people I know being Cylons, but I chalk that up to when I was watching 7 episodes a day of BSG.

I don’t know. Maybe my brain is just overly stressed. A friend told me the other day that I’m too “impatient” and “intense”. Sadly, he’s not the first person who has told me lately that I need to calm the fuck down. I find it sadly ironic that my parents both seem to think I’m this lazy “let the chips fall where they may” type of person, whereas most of my friends think I need to lighten the hell up, and not grasp things so tightly, and not try to control things so much.

Either way, I just know I would really like to be able to sleep through the night.